I have a dream that one day … the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society … shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law … That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.

I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhwre. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’ who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for someone else’s freedom who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’